IN DEPTH
Frankfurt’s strategy The book fair evolution
Frankfurt Book Fair’s director Jürgen Boos tells Tom Tivnan about the changing demographic at the Buchmesse, and its plans to reach more readers across the city, and beyond...
The fair approach T
he 70th Frankfurt Book Fair begins today and, as is oſten the case, the Buchmesse may act as a bellwether for the global publishing industry. The
most obvious method will be through the many big rights deals struck in the halls this week, which will dictate what readers will be buying in the next couple of years. But a trip around the Messe oſten gives a less obvious
Biography Jürgen Boos
Prior to joining the Frankfurt Book Fair as president and c.e.o. in 2005, Jürgen Boos earned degrees in both market- ing and organisational theory, and worked as a publisher at Herder Verlag in Freiburg. He also held management positions at Droemer Knaur Verlag, Carl Hanser Verlag, Springer Science and Business Media and John Wiley & Sons.
Boos is also president
of Litprom (the Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature) and m.d. of FBF’s literacy campaign LitCam. In January 2017, he received an honorary degree from the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University; he is also a member the of Akademie Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize Academy).
nod to what, and who, will dominate world publishing. Oſten one can tell which territories are going to switch into high (or higher) gear just by looking at the increase in exhibitor space for a country or region. And, in square metreage, Chinese exhibitors are the ones who are gobbling up more space in 2018. FBF director Juergen Boos says: “China is our biggest growth country, as it has been for the past few years. But South East Asia overall is doing well. Part of that is general geographic trends, but it’s also helped by some of the changes we’ve made; we’ve had big push in our Frankfurt Kids’ programme, and there is a huge interest in children’s, Young Adult and education there.” Africa is the region that has surprised in 2018: “In the past few years we have had few participants from Africa, and if they did come it tended to be as trade visitors [rather than exhibitors]. We have 39 publishers from 19 African countries this year… there is an interesting new dynamic across the entire continent.” The vast bulk of FBF’s exhibitors are still the Western European and North American powerhouses. One-third of all exhibitors in 2017 were from Germany (2,419 out of 7,309), a further 25% came from the rest of Europe and 15% were from the US and Canada. But those mature markets have all had their various struggles in the last decade, reflected in flat or shrinking numbers. Boos says: “We have some contraction in German-language exhibi- tors this year, especially Germany, where we have some smaller publishers disappearing. We have a stagnating market in the rest of Europe.” Encouragingly, though, “the North Americans are coming” back, says Boos, although the uptick might have less to do with market forces, and more to do with the fact that Canada will be Frankfurt’s Guest of Honour in 2020. The programme is a years-long cycle, and generally leads to a boost in numbers from the featured country before and aſter its year in the spotlight. That external market forces oſten dictate the number
of atendees underscores why Boos and his team must continually reshape the fair. A programme that caters to Continues overleaf
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